1445 
33 

>y 1 



AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT THE 



INAUGURATION OF THE AUTHOR 

■ AS 

PRESIDENT OF DAETMOUTH COLLEGE, 

NOVEMBER 18, 1863. 

/ 

BY REV. ASA D.'SMITH, D.D. 

WITH THE 

. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 



HIS EXCELLENCY JOSEPH A. GILMORE, 

GOVERNOR OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. 



PUBUSHED BY REQUEST OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES. 



i HANOVER, N. H. \ 

-p^tjfi s!t>j^ 



/• 



AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT THE 



INAUGURATION OF THE AUTHOR 



PKESIDENT OF DAETMOUTH COLLEGE, / 






NOVEMBER 18, 1863. " '- 




BY REV. ASA D. SMITH, D. D 



INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 



HIS EXCELLENCY JOSEPH A. GILMORE, 

GOTEEJfOH OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE BOAED OF TRUSTEES. 



5 HANOVER, N. H 

1SG3. 



v^ 



1^ 



s 



I? 



uu 



PRELIMINARY NOTE. 

The Order of Exercises at the Inauguration of the Rev. Asa 
D. Smith, D. D., as President of Dartmouth College, was as 
follows: 1. Music, by the Lebanon Band. 2. Introductory Ad- 
dress, by His Excellency Joseph A. Gilmoke. 3. Reading 
Select Portions of Scriptures by the Rev. Professor Daxiel J. ^, 
Notes, D. D. 4. Prayer, by Rev. Zedekiah S. Bakstow, D. D. 
5. Music, by the Handel Society. 6. Inaugural Address, by the 
Peesident Elect. 7. Music, by the Handel Society. 8. Prayer, 
by the Ex-President, Rev. Nathan Loed, D. D. 9. Benediction, 
by the Rev. S. P. Leeds, of Hanover. 



INTEODUCTORY ADDRESS. 

BY 

HIS EXCELLENCY JOSEPH A. GILMORE, 

GOVERNOR OF TEE STATE OF NEW HAMFSHIRK. 



Officers, Students and Friends of Dartmouth Col- 
lege : 

The occasion on wliicb ^ve are met is one of peculiar 
interest. After the lapse of a third of a century, this 
ancient seat of learning is without a head. We have 
met here to-day to supply that want, or rather to con- 
summate that action of the Honorable Board of Trus- 
tees by wdiich the want has already been most promptly 
and efficiently provided for. It is my privilege and my 
duty, as Chief Magistrate of the State of New Hamp- 
shire, to formally announce to you those facts which 
have already gladdened your hearts. The Trustees of 
the College have unanimously chosen Rev. Dr. Asa D. 
Smith, of New York city, to preside over its affairs. 
He has signified his acceptance of this high and sacred 
office, and presents himself here to-day to formally 
enter upon the discharge of its duties. It is my privi- 

(5) 



lege, Sir, to" welcome you to our Commonwealth, aud to 
an office which I am sure you will signally honor. 

There are certain circumstances and relationships 
which render this duty especially pleasant to me, and 
almost reconcile me to the unaccustomed service of 
speaking before such an assembly and in such a place. 
It is no formal welcome which I give you, Sir, to-day. 
We have played as boys together amid the Green 
Mountains of my native State, and the name of Asa 
Dodge Smith recalls the tenderest memories, and re- 
minds me that the same blood flows in your veins and 
my own. Widely have our paths in life diverged, yet 
here we meet again in maturer years ; not too old, I 
trust, nor too much elated by the honors which have fallen 
to our lot, to renew the friendship of our childhood. 

I welcome you, as a son of Dartmouth, back to your 
mother's arms, after a generation has passed away, and 
rejoice that no ordinance, human or divine, hinders us 
from hailing the son as at the same time the husband 
and the father. Your vigorous manhood gives promise 
of a lasting union. That large experience w^hich the 
Great Metropolis has given you, joined to that native 
strength of character which led me to look up to you 
when a boy, assures us that the offspring of mother 
Dartmouth which shall be reared under your charge, 
will be worthy to be remembered with such illustrious 
names as Webster and Choate. The tender and tearful 
reluctance with which the people of your late charge 
have given you up, leads us to believe that you will 



soon will the confidence of your associates in office, and 
the love of the young gentlemen entrusted to your care. 

I feel, Sir, that the interests of our college are safe 
in your hands. You will not only exemplify a pure 
morality and inculcate lessons of sound wisdom, but 
enforce a patriotism which, while it is untainted by 
fanaticism, shrinks from no sacrifice w^hich our country 
demands. The sons of Dartmouth in the camp and on 
the battlefield will be to you as your own children. 
Eelying on God for aid, you will assuredly win the 
praise of all, as a Christian, a scholar, a patriot. 

Although the founders of this republic have, with a 
wise forethought, given its rulers only a nominal con- 
nection with this seat of learning, yet let me say to you, 
that you W'ill find myself and my associates in office 
ready to cooperate in every work which may lighten 
your labors, or render them more effective for good. 
The sense of what I have myself lost in being deprived 
of such training as is here given, only makes me more 
anxious to extend these facilities to others. It shall be 
my personal aim to render our only college worthy of 
the honored names which grace its catalogue, and of Him 
to whose service it w^as dedicated by its pious founders. 
It shall be my prayer, that not the least prosperous 
epoch in its history may be wdien it was governed by 
the counsels of President Smith. In behalf of the Cor- 
poration, Sir, I w^elcome you to these solemn services, 
which are to invest you with the high and responsible 
office of President of Dartmouth College. 



REPLY OF THE PRESIDENT ELECT. 

I HAYE been deeply impressed, may it please your 
Excellency, by the terms in which you have seen lit to 
address me. Especially touching have been your allu- 
sions to bygone years. I deem it a rare felicity, that in 
declaring thus publicly, as I have already done in a 
more private way, my acceptance of the position to 
which I have been called, I do it through one, in whom- 
I recognize at once the playmate of my boyhood, and 
the honored Chief Magistrate of my native State. 
The scenes to wdiich you have referred, seemed, as you 
spoke, to pass freshly before me. And I cannot but 
think, as I recall them, that your own training amid the 
Green Mountains, had no small share in preparing you 
for the eminent public service you have rendered, in this 
great crisis of our countrj^'s histor3\ Again thanking 
you for the kindness of vour preetioft', I reserve for an- 
other point in the programme, what I have to say of the 
important trust committed to me. 



THE COLLEGE, L\ ITS PEOPER FUXCTIOXS AND CHAPtACTEPJSTICS. 



AN INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 



EEY. ASA D. SMITH, D.D. 



There are four chief organic forces, by whicb, under 
the providence of God, humanity has its normal devel- 
opment. These, generalizing broadly, are the family, 
the school, the state, and the church. Wherever vou 
find, even in its lowest measure, a true civilization, 
these exist ; and as it rises they rise, sustaining to it the 
relation both of cause and effect. Concerning, as they 
do, one and the same complex nature, they have, in 
different degrees and combinations, the same underlying 
elements of power. In the family, w^e have, in its rudi- 
mental form, both teaching and government. It is a 
patriarchate — a little commonwealth ; and to its head — 
a priest as w^ell as a patriarch — that Scripture should 
ever be relevant, "the church that is in thy house." 
In the school, the simplest offshoot, perhaps, from a 

(9) 



10 

congeries of families, we have, or ought to have, the 
parental element; we have magistracy also, and a cer- 
tain statehood ; we have, or should have, worship. The 
state, properly apprehended, is not only governmental 
but didactic — it is a teaching power ; and though not, 
at this age of the world, theocratic, it should be, in a 
large view, religious. In the church, having specially 
and predominantly the last-named characteristic — -being, 
of divine appointment, and as ministering to our impera- 
tive needs, the foster-mother of devotion — we have, also, 
as essential to its purpose, both rule and instruction. 
And in the influence they wield, these great moulding 
agencies are perpetually interpenetrating and modify- 
ing each other. 

It is of the second of these, the school, that we arc 
now called to speak. The service we essay is con- 
nected with an educational institution, using the term 
in the specific sense; a fact, it may be said at the out- 
set, which of itself dignifies the occasion. Not to insist 
on those affinities and mutual influences just adverted 
to, and of which there will be further occasion to speak, 
there is a' view of education, a large and comprehensive 
one, which gives to it the very grandest elevation. It 
is the end, next to that which the good old Catechism 
makes chief, and subordinate to that, of all the divine 
provisions and arrangements. God is the great Edu- 
catoir of the universe. More glorious in his didactic 
offices is He than even in creation ; nay, creation was 
for these. Earth is our training place — time is our cur- 



11 



riciilum ; eternity will but furnish to the true pupil the 
higher forms of his limitless advancement, "^"e have 
our lessons in all providence, in all beings and things, 
God teaching us in and through all. No mean vocation, 
then, is that of the earthly educator ; no unimportant 
theme that now in hand. Yet even of the school in 
the more technical sense of the term, we cannot speak at 
large, except as in touching on any one department we 
more or less affect every other. Our thought may be 
fitly limited to that class of institutions which these 
ancient halls of learning and these inauguration solem- 
nities naturally bring before us. The College is my 
subject, considered ix its proper fuxctioxs axd 

CHARACTERISTICS. 

I use the term College in the American sense. This, 
not for the poor purpose of ministering to national 
vanity, but because w^e must needs take things as they 
are ; and for the further reason, that there is much 
to coran:iend in the shape the institution here assumes. 
It has hardly its prototype either in the Fatherland or 
on the Continent. It has but a partial resemblance 
either to the German Gymnasia or to the English pre- 
paratory schools, as of Eton and Rugby. As prelim- 
inary to professional study, it is in some respects far in 
advance of these. It differs materially, at once from the 
German and English University, and from the College as 
embraced in the latter. University education in Europe 
was once somewhat rigidly divided into two portions ; 
the one designed to form the mind for whatever sphere 



12 



of life ; the other, the Bvodshidium^ as the Germans 
significantly term it, a course of training for some par- 
ticular profession. Long ago, however, this division 
became mainly obsolete. " On the continent," said an 
eminent English scholar, some years since, " the jpre- 
paratory education has been dropped : among ourselves, 
the professional.'''' He speaks, of course, comparatively. 
So far as England is concerned, the same testimony is 
borne by a well-informed recent observer. This ancient 
and wise division is by us still maintained ; with this 
peculiarity, that the "preparatory" education, so- 
called, — by which is meant the highest form of it, — is the 
sole work of the Colleges. Professional culture is 
remitted to other and often separate schools. The 
undergraduate course is for general training ; it lays the 
foundation for whatever superstructure. It has no par- 
ticular reference to any one pursuit ; but, like the first 
part of the old University course, aims to fit the whole 
man for a man's work in any specific line either of study 
or of action. 

In this conception of the College, there are, it is 
believed, important advantages. It is better for pre- 
paratory education ; it is better for professional. It 
felicitousl}^ discriminates. It keeps things in their 
place. It defines and duly magnifies each of the two 
great departments of the educational process. It is 
likelier to dig deep, and build on broad and solid rock ; 
it tends to symmetry and finish in the superincumbent 
fabric. It is well, on many accounts, that the different 



13 



professional institutions be, as often happens, linked 
with the College ; in this relation, they may both give 
and receive. Yet let them uot lose their identity. 
Let them not trench upon the College, or the College 
upon them. Let that still remain, as the great central 
reservoir, as the galvanic battery whose life-currents 
thrill them all. Call the whole u University, if you 
please ; yet we own a preference for our more common 
term. Nor is there reason for attempting, what some have 
proposed, a still higher class of schools for general cul- 
ture. The object is a good one, but not the method. 
It is better, we judge, to endow more amply and 
variousl}^ existing institutions, and so to furnish, w^ithin 
their walls, whatever opportunities may be desired. It 
is more accordant at once with the genius of our politi- 
cal system, which favors diffusion rather than concentra- 
tion and monopoly, and with the work proper to our 
present stage of national development, that of founding 
rather than finishing. That we adapt ourselves to both, 
is no less philosophical than patriotic. We v/ould 
retain not only the old name, but the old form of the 
American College, only giving enlargement to the form, 
and rendering it more worthy of the central position it 
holds. 

Of the importance of the College, as thus defined, it 
w^ould seem scarcely needful, in this presence, to speak. 
It might put us in peril of commonplaces and truisms. 
Yet it fares with this power as with the great forces of 
nature ; the very universality and quiet might of its 



14 



working, the quietness coming of the might — the un- 
pretentious commonness of the blessings it confers — 
dulls, even in the intelligent, the sense of its worth. 
The truth concerning it is "so true," as Coleridge 
phrases it, that it "loses the power of truth f and our 
minds need to be refreshed with repetitions, at least, if 
not with novelties. It is no rhetorical exaggeration to 
say, that we find in the College the Archimedean condi- 
tion, the uov gtC) whence the world is moved. We have 
already glanced at its relations to professional study, in 
virtue of which it shapes and colors all professional life. 
We speak in general, not oblivious of the great merit, 
in exceptional cases, of self-made men. It is as the 
secret laboratory of nature in which the material is fur- 
nished for the statuary, whether the fine Carrara or 
a block of coarser grain. The professional teacher has 
to work on what is here supplied ; and the result of his 
labor is largely determined by the habits of study, the 
mental acumen, the logical power, the various furniture 
of knowledge, the intellectual and moral leanings, which 
the pupil acquires in the College curriculum. Here are 
the seeds and germs of things ; here, intertwined with 
each other, the roots of all sturdy growth. This is true, 
in a degree, of all previous education ; yet that is rather 
a preparing of the soil, than a radication, such as Col- 
lege training gives, of great informing principles. We 
toucli the Bar here, training the intellect to thread all 
perplexing mazes, and the tongue for masterly speech. 
We touch the Bench ; we send a quickening and an 



15 



elevating influence through all jurisprudence. Largely 
is the Medical Profession affected ; for, while we accord 
due honor to many of its members who have not been 
favored with a course of liberal* culture, even they would 
gratefully acknowledge the beneficent issue of such a 
course, in the science elaborated for them, and minister- 
ing so variously to their art, as well as in the radiance 
of many of the great lights of the fraternity. Still more 
deeply is the Gospel Ministry, with all the momentous 
interests that hang upon it, indebted to the College. 
Not only are the clergy more generally trained there, 
they bear through life, more evidently perhaps than an}^ 
other profession, the stamp of that training. It affects 
not only the form, but the very substance of their 
thought. The teacher who, with cunning hand, moulds 
the metaphysics of a student, goes far, say what you 
will, to mould his theology ; to settle the question 
whether he shall be reverent and biblical, or opinion- 
ated and rationalistic, meagerly literal and narrowly 
individualistic, or of a generous and far-reaching catho- 
licit}^ 

Need I advert, with the history of this Institution 
before us, to political life — to that relation of the school, 
hinted at the outset, to the State? "The four pillars 
of government, '^ says my Lord Bacon, "are religion, 
justice, counsel, and treasure." How much have our 
Colleges done, not only to form, but to keep intact and 
beautiful, that pillar of "counsel." In what comitia 
of the democracry, in what legislative assembly of the 



16 

land, are tliey not an ever-present power? There is 
another training, indeed, for the mere politician. Na}^, 
we concede much, as w^e have already hinted, to that ex- 
traordinary native talent, that self-constructive ability, 
which, in public as well as private life, outstrips often 
all expectation. Yet we still insist, that here, mainly, 
are the springs of all lofty statesmanship. Nor do we 
disparage our noble Common School System, we virtu- 
al]}^ plead for it ; for as touching both its inception 
and its wise progression ; its books, its apparatus, its 
teachers ; its method and its pabulum of thought ; the 
College is its life. So of all other inferior forms of edu- 
cation. Even Agriculture and all Mechanical Indus- 
try are concerned. There is not a hill-side or a valley 
in our land, but has been illumined and gladdened by 
the most abstract science of our higher training ; not a 
ploughshare but it has sharpened; not a spring, or a 
a wheel, or a spindle, or a steam-engine, or a furnace - 
fire, in any of our work-shops, but it has adjusted. It 
has given to the miner the true divining-rod and the 
safety-lamp. It has made the stars of heaven the 
familiar guides of the mariner ; it has peopled the deep 
with new and strange leviathans of art ; and it«is now 
busy in piercing it with those cords of a grand sodalit}-, 
by which in due time the jarring nations are to become, 
one. As we call to mind thus, the universality of the 
influence wielded by the College ; that it is not only 
itself a centre of power, but is ever forming centres of 
power — that it not only leads itself, but is ever training 



17 



the leaders of all tliouglit and action } as we consider 
its relations to all literature, periodical and permanent ; 
as we think of its adaptedness — especially in its Ameri- 
can attitude of accessibleness to all, and its strong hold 
on the popular sympathy — to check that materialistic 
spirit, which, from obvious causes, marks the age, and 
which has been so the bane of our land, that the God 
of our fathers must needs employ these fires of war to 
purge it away ; it will not be deemed strange, that in 
words which do but stir up these pure and learned 
minds by way of remembrance, we have been beguiled 
beyond our first thought, in urging its importance. 

As the capabilities of any human instrumentality 
grow in our apprehension, so deepens within us the 
sense of responsibility. In view of the proper position 
and functions of the College, as they have now been set 
forth and emphasized, it is natural to ask, how may it 
be made most efi^ective ? Let us note, then, in that 
mere outline to which the time restricts us, some of its 
chief normetl characteristics. If we picture the ideal, 
it will be all the better ; for only as it works toward 
that, has the actual a true advancement. 

The College should be marked, we say then, first, by a 
certain completeness. Rejecting the fragmentary and the 
unfinished, the well constituted- mind ever craves this. 
Modern thought, especially, is passing from an excessive 
nominalism to a more realistic habit ; by many a broad 
induction, from mere details to a rounded whole. And. 
nowhere more persistently than in relation to institu- 
2 



18 

tions. The college should be complete as to its objec- 
tive 'Scheme. There may be onesidedness here. There 
may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed press- 
ing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer ; or there may be an undue exaltation of what 
he calls " the decorative element." The theoretic may 
be too exclusively pursued ; or there may be a practical- 
ness which has too little of theory, like a cone required 
to stand firm on its apex. There should be complete- 
ness, also, as toucliing the suhjective aim. It should 
embrace, in a word, the whole man, and that not in his 
Edenic aspects alone, but as a fallen being. You may 
not overlook even the physical ; the casket not merely, 
holdhig all the mental and moral treasures — the frame 
work rather, to which b}^ subtile ties the invisible ma- 
chinery is linked, and which upliolds it as it works. 
The world has yet to learn fully how dependent is the 
inner upon the outer man, and how greatly the highest 
achievements of scholarship are facilitated by proper 
hygienic conditions. As you pass to the intellectual, it 
matters little what classification you adopt, whether 
with the author of the Novum Organum^ in his Ad- 
vancement of Learning, you resolve all the powers into 
those of memory, imagination, and reason, or wdiether 
the minuter divisions of a more recent philosophy are 
preferred ; only be sure that not a single faculty is 
overlooked or disparaged. Be it presentative, conserv- 
ative, reproductive, representative, elaborative, regu- 
lative, or whatever the fine Hamiltonian analysis may 



19 



suggest, give it its proper place and its proper scope. 
Take not your pupil as a Briareus, all hands, or a C}'- 
clops with but one eye. Let Memory, the mother of 
the Muses, by some undervalued and neglected, be duly 
cared for. Let strength and tenacity be given her, 
and in her mystic repositories let all precious things be 
accumulated. Let the judgment, in the broadest sense 
of the term, be thoroughly trained ; let it be taught to 
analyze, to synthetize, to add link to link in the longest 
chain of ratiocination, to hold with a steady hand the 
golden balance of truth. Give to the imagination, that 
weird and potent faculty, at once its impulse, it furni- 
ture, and its law. With deftest touches, let the whole 
aisthetic nature be developed ; both the source and the 
test, as it is, of all that is most charming in letters and 
in art. And let the communicative faculty, combining 
so marvelously the intellectual and the physical, with 
its ''Gate Beautiful" between the inner and the outer 
world, have the wisest culture. Give us not monsters 
from this laboratory of character, but men, symmetrical 
men. 

To attain this end, however, we must pass, as has 
been intimated, beyond the merely intellectual ; we must 
embrace the moral nature. How vast the void if we 
omit it. One of the masters of modern fiction has 
given us as one of his chief characters, exquisitely pic- 
tured, a man literally and absolutely without a con- 
science. But we have no Margraves in real life. Not 
one such did the Great Apostle to the pagan world 



20 

find, ill all the wide circuit of his evangelism. Not 
only is the moral nature universal, it is central, it is 
ultimate. The whole man is for it. To fail either of 
including or of magnifying it, is the starkest educa- 
tional solecism. Nor do you thus a partial wrong. 
One of De Tocqueville's chapters on "Democracy in 
America,'' is given to the position, that " excessive care 
of worldly welfare may impair that welfare." A like 
evil results from an exclusive culture of the intellect. 
The man suffers more than a hemiplegy ; the whole 
being is touched. We may admit, with De Gerando, 
that " intellectual progress is always, in itself, favor- 
able to moral progress." But we must deny, with him, 
' that the first can supply the place of the second." 
We must insist, as he does, " that the former only im- 
poses a greater necessity and a greater duty of laboring 
for the latter, in order to preserve constantly the har- 
mony of the two systems." It is a fine saying of an 
English Essayist, " Genius should be world-wide, but 
it should not be world-limited." The issue of such 
limitation — the shutting out from its vision of the great, 
supernatural and eternal verities — can hardly fail to be 
a limitation of its power, as well as a dimming of its 
briditness. An evil influence flows out, besides, 
through all channels, into the wide world. We have a 
Bj'ron and a Shelley instead of a Milton and a Cowper ; 
a Jeffreys instead of a Hale ; a Buckingham instead of 
a Burke ; an Arnold instead of a Washington. It 
will not be soon forgotten, that no small part of the 



21 



treachery in military circles which has marked our 
present great national conflict, has been ascribed, on 
high authority, to a system of discipline "calculated to 
confound in the mind of the pupil, the distinctions be- 
tween right and wrong, and to substitute, in the decision 
of grave moral questions, habit for conscience." 

To completeness as touching our aims, be it further 
noted, completeness of metliod is essential. Much that 
has been held by some a reproach to our Colleges, as if 
it were useless, and so a mere waste of time and labor, 
has been really to their praise. If you would unfold all 
the powers, you must have all the processes, and it is 
just at that the programme of study aims. If we 
would reach the desired result, not only teachers but 
patrons and pupils must have done with the notion, 
that this or that branch is of little moment, and may be 
omitted or slighted. In Language, that meets us on the 
threshold, we have not only the exponent,, but the in- 
strument and auxiliary of thought. As it mirrors the 
soul, it helps us to the knowledge thereof, xlnd, as 
thoroughly studied, it gives to the various faculties — to 
every one of them — a kind of discipline wdiich can 
neither be found elsewhere, nor safely dispensed with. 
We say language, meaning first our own, worthy in 
every College of a distinct professorship, and not ex- 
cluding whatever modern tongues can be acquired, but 
emphasizing, also, the ancient classics. The controversy 
about these may perhaps be considered as ended. Dead, 
those old languages may be called ; but it is only as the 



22 



grain of wheat is dead Avbicli we have cast into the 
ground. Many a glorious dvdGraoLg have they in all 
modern literature, and not least in our Anglo-Saxon. 
With their manifold vitalities our own tongue is all in- 
stinct. Nay, their fleshy fibres run through all its 
frame-work ; so that we can have the full mastery of it, 
in its spirit as well as its form, in its nicer as well as 
its bolder points, only as they are mastered. They lead 
us, besides, to the old fountains of thought, fresh, pure, 
sparkling, as the springs that gush from our mountain 
sides. With uo little truth may we apply here, what 
Chaucer sang in a broader view : 

" Out of the old fields, as men saitlie, 

Coraetli all this new corn fro yero to yere ; 
And out of old books, in good faithe, 

Cometh all this new science that men lere." 

To linguistic study let Mathematical be added. It 
has a worth peculiar to itself, promoting, as it does, con- 
centration, continuity, and comprehensiveness of thought. 
By learning to tread safely the po7is asinoriiin^ and 
other perilous places indicated on the blackboard, the 
student escapes many a lap-nis mentis on dizzy heights 
of his future life-journe3\ He gains the veiy key of 
knowledge, besides, in various important practical rela- 
tions. Nor let Metaphysics, whether in the narrower 
or the broader sense, be held in contempt, as shadowy, 
•uncertain and unprofitable. Shall man know all things 
that minister to him, and not know himself? Or shall 
he know the visible and tangible, phenomenally alone ? 



23 



Scarce any line of study is more conducive to mental 
acuteness. Scarce any is more imperatively enjoined 
by the signs of the times. What need of guarding the 
future guides of opinion against both the Scylla and the 
Charj^bdis of modern speculation ; against a dreamy 
idealism, on the one hand, introducing us to a phantas- 
magoric universe, carrying its resolution of all visible 
entities beyond even the primeval fire-mist, merging, by 
some form of Berkeley ism, the not me in the me^ and 
at last the finite in the infinite, and so landing us, after 
preliminarj^ vagaries of rationalism and reason-worship, 
in a dreary and desolate pantheism ; or a shallow though 
pretentious sensationalism, on the other hand, losing the 
me in the not me, making the phenomenal and the mate- 
rial all, substituting in ethics utilities for principles, and 
coming, finally, through tortuous passages of the positive 
philosophy, to a dark and comfortless atheism. With 
intellectual philosophy. Logic is intimately connected, 
that science of the laws of thought as thought, or of 
thought as it masters truth, including all processes of 
reasoning, which the genius of the great Scottish meta- 
physician has of late so illustrated and dignified. Can 
we omit this from our circle of attainment ? Or can we 
forget the goodly offices of Ehetoric, arraying all thought 
in robes of beauty, and giving it a tongue of sweetness 
and power ? There is little need of insisting on Natural 
Science, in its various departments ; so well recognized 
are its claims, as it passes from the once mute but now 
eloquent rocks up to the marvels of human physiology, 



24 

from the play of all minuter affinities to the music of the 
spheres. Most enriching is it to the mind, not to speak 
of practical ends ; so luminous with thought is all 
nature, and of such typical significance. It has innumer- 
able relations, moreover, to all other science. We add 
only a word for History, reverend chronicler of the 
ages, philosophy, in the largest view, teaching by 
example ; and that word is, not only to vindicate the 
measure of attention we award it, but to pronounce it — 
in the greater value and the wider compass assigned it 
by modern thinking, as it not only prosecutes more fully 
its old explorations, but enters the comparatively new 
field of ethnological inquiry — w^orthy of still greater 
prominence. *' Histories," says Bacon, "make men 
wise.'' So far as the intellect is concerned — and quite 
as clearly, we might show at large, in relation to the 
moral nature — w^e can spare nothing from our full- 
orbed programme ; we will increase the diameter, but 
we cannot mar the circumference. 

Let it not be forgotten, however, that to this com- 
pleteness of aim and of method, a corresponding com- 
pleteness of endowment and of furniture is indispensable. 
You set us the old Egyptian task without it. We must 
have professorships in adequate number, not crowding 
into one department what might fitly and amplj^ fill two. 
We must have apparatus. We must have College 
buildings, sufficient and convenient — good workshops, 
if you ask for good work ; and if there be some touches 
about them of the rising architectural taste, it will be 



25 



all (he better. A fagade or a tower may teacli, as 
effectively as a book. We must have libraries. Here 
has been, perhaps, the weakest point of our American 
Colleges. Said one of our eminent scholars, some thirty 
years ago, '' There is not a library in the United States, 
in the European sense of the term." In the lapse of 
these years, it is true, the case has been greatly im- 
proved ; yet even now, the aggregate of the books in 
the alcoves of all our New England Colleges, would not 
equal some single libraries of the Old World. Give us 
more books then. They are needed for reference, for 
study, for incitement. What inspiration there is in a 
well filled library, what guidance and food of thought, 
how light beams and electric currents flow forth from 
its shelves, every real student knows. We need, too, 
foundations for worthy young men, rich in genius but 
poor in pelf. While many such are kept from our 
halls, the education of others, is by the stern hand of 
poverty pinched into sad incompleteness. Let those 
whose joy it is to transmute their gold and silver into 
mental and moral treasures, see to it, that our Colleges 
have the amplitude of equipment essential to that full- 
ness and symmetry which we have thus briefly sketched. 
We have next to afiirm, that the College should have 
also a conservative character. There has been much 
abuse of that trite term conservatism ; yet, rightly In- 
terpreted, it has a broad and precious significance. It 
is not bare immobility. It is not the girdling of trees till 
they die, or the rearing of fences around their lifeless 



26 

stumps. A pile of rocks is not a conservatory ; nor 
even a ball of cold, motionless statuary. True conser- 
vatism is the cherisliing of all the great vital forces ; the 
])rinciples, which, though old as creation, or even as 
God, do yet'flourish in immortal beauty, and are worthy 
of perpetual reverence. It is that holding fast to the 
old, in its fundamental, changeless elements, without 
which all the new is as " the baseless fabric of a vision." 
Colleges, from the very thoroughness of their investi- 
gations, — descending as they do to the roots of things, 
— and from their natural predilection for the orderly 
and the systematic, instead of the desultory and the 
disjointed, might be expected to be conservative. They 
are too scientific to be rashly empirical. Conservative 
they have ordinarily been, from their inception until 
now. They have kept safe many a good thing, which 
mankind would otherwise have lost. In this excellent 
way let them continue. As to modes of teaching and 
discipline, let them not follow every ignis fatiuis, but 
carefully and patiently "prove all things.'' As to 
alleged discoveries in the realm of physical science, let 
them not make haste. The jaw-bone of the geologist 
may turn out not quite so effective as that which Samp- 
son wielded, and so the old chronology may have some 
days of grace. Let them not be unduly prepense to 
change, in the metaphysical, ethical, or religious 
sphere ; lest the mirage be taken for fountains, or cloud 
banks for solid land. We need here in America, amid 
the fascination and intoxication of all our newness, 



27 



and the self-sufficiency engendered by i(, to cultivate, 
every way, the habit of reverence, and especially of 
reverence for the old. Not tlie old dross, indeed, but 
the pure old gold. There was something known, let us 
often remind ourselves, before the culmination of this 
most knowing age. The masters of thought and opin- 
ion in bygone times — such as Bacon, and Locke, and 
Edwards — however they may have failed in some points, 
were no prating sciolists. Even the wise modern world 
may learn something of them. In points, not a few, of 
our real advancement, it should be gratefully remem- 
bered, we have but built on the foundations which their 
giant hands had laid. Xay, in many directions, we are 
reminded of our Lord's saying : " No man having drunk 
old wine, straightway desireth the new ; for he saith, 
the old is better.'' 

Yet with a due conservatism, the College should be 
animated also, be it further observed, by the sjyirit of 
progress. Else it is not really conservative. For 
whatever is vital, naturally grows ; and, with the lapse 
of time, everything pertaining to science and literature 
is becoming more and more vital. Law — pervading, 
quickening, moulding — is seen everywhere. We may 
say of it as Lispiration has said of Wisdom : " When 
there were no depths it was brought forth, when there 
were no fountains aboundina: witii water.'' Even old 
chaos, lifeless and barren as it seemed, was vet most 
germinant, and so, in a good sense, most radical ; it 
imbosomed manifold elements of progress — principles, 



28 

divinely originated and sustained, that must needs de- 
velop themselves in forms of beauty and grandeur. 
There is a theistic, as well as an atheistic theory of 
development. Nowhere in nature have we absolute 
stagnancy, but everywhere action, reaction, movement. 
What we used to call the imponderables, — caloric, for 
example, — the later science is resolving into mere 
modes of motion. The burning of a dwelling or a city 
is held to be nothing more than an extraordinary agi- 
tation of the monads. Even ponderable " hard mat- 
ter," philosophers are beginning to tell us, is but " an 
antagonistic force," the product of "God's simple 
activity in counter-agency;'' and that in such perpetual 
flux, that we can speak of nothing, in strictness, as 
heing^ but only as hecoming. One of our profoundest 
physicists has just shown us, on a broad scale, that 
" the law of nature's constancy is ever subordinate to 
the higher law of change ; " the stabilities, or underly- 
ing forces, are ever for the mutations, the transfor- 
mations, \\\Q advancements. So meet together, as we 
have said, the old and the new ; so does progress har- 
monize with conservatism. After this manner all 
providence goes onward, not moving pendulously, or 
in a vain circle. So language grows, and industry, and 
commerce, and law, and government, and all our com- 
])lex civilization. So all human thought proceeds ; and 
that educational institution is unworthy of the name, 
which fails practically to recognize the fact. 

In a higher sense than Galileo affirmed, " the world 



29 



moves," and we must keep abreast with it. What pro- 
gress has there been, in modern times especially, in all 
physical science ! What a meagre thing, comparatively, 
was the chemistry of fifty years ago ! What poor make- 
shifts were many of its theories! Where was geology 
then? Where, ethnology? In almost every depart- 
ment of knowledge, what new discoveries have been 
made ; what new definitions and generalizations, what 
improved processes have been introduced ! Even in 
metaphysical science, remitted though it is by many to 
dream-land, there has been, we are fain to believe, sub- 
stantial gain. A little spiral the movement may have 
been ; yet we think it has been onward. And not only 
have we the present to master, a great future lies be- 
fore us ; we are as yet, in Newton's phrase, but picking 
up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth. 
We are to go on from knowing to know. Even in ethi- 
cal relations there has been, and there is still to be, 
progress ; not in the old principles, immutable as their 
author, but in the ever-varying applications. It is the 
same sunlight that shines on from dawn to mid-day, only 
it beams farther and farther down into deep valle3\s 
and ravines unvisited at first. And while, as to the 
matter of all good learning, the College should be in no 
respect behind-hand, the same may be said of the 
methods. As has been hinted, we are not to adopt at 
once all new-fangled schemes ; otherwise we shall vex 
ourselves with much educational quackery. Yet we are 
never to imagine that, touching a work so great as the 



30 

training of the human mind, nothing remains to be 
learned. Our eyes should be open to all the new that 
is true and good, and our hands ready to modify our 
own system accordingly. Let the standard of attain- 
ment which we propose to our pupils, above all, be 
ever rising. Let us not cater, however tempted, to that 
spirit of unprofitable and really unprogressive haste 
which, unhappily, is not yet quite exorcised even from 
New England. To all who seek admission to our halls 
let us say, raiher ^fe-stina lente. It were well if the line 
of preparation for College were, in most cases, much ex- 
tended, or at least more thoroughly mastered. Nor let 
us here essay the casting up of any roj^al roads, save as 
hard and protracted study is ever right royal — that, 
only, tending to a true advancement. 

We cannot forbear to note, in this relation, what has 
been already suggested in another, the importance of 
ampler College endowments. I speak not of this insti- 
tution particularly, but of the sisterhood generally. 
Such endowments are essential to a rounded fullness, as 
has been said, and they are indispensable to that growth 
for which we plead. Let clear-sighted men of means 
understand the matter ; would I could reach the ears 
of all such in our land. As the farming apparatus of 
the last century, the factory, the mercantile establish- 
ment, would be quite inadequate to the demands of the 
present times, and as what now replaces them must 
surely have various improvement and enlargement in 
coming years, so, clearly, is it with the College. You 



\ 



31 



cannot take it, if j^on keep it worth anything, out of tlie 
current of an ever-advancing civilization. It must have, 
therefore, ever-increasing means. Let its generous 
patrons understand that it is never done ; it follows the 
physical law just now alluded to — it is ever lecominfj. 
Be it that you have met what seem its present w^ants ; 
others, be sure, will soon arise. A new professorship 
will be needed, or a new building, or new apparatus, or 
new scholarships, or a new alcove of books. Your 
heart, if God permits you to live as his noble-minded 
steward upon earth, will as certainly be gladdened by 
another call from it, as 

" Tlirough the ages one increasing purpose runs. 
And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns." 

The College, we add only, should be distinctly and 
eminently Christian. Not in the narrow, sectarian 
sense — that be far from us — but in the broadest evan- 
gelical view. Our course of thought culminates here ; 
and here does all else that has been affirmed find its 
proper centre and unity. Christianity is the great unity. 
In it, as was intimated at the outset, are all the chief 
elements of organic influence. It is itself the very acme 
of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. 
It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing 
perfectly the impelling and restraining forces ; by a feli- 
citous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, en- 
suring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the 
o-olden girdle wherewith every institution like this 



32 



should bind lier garments of strength and beauty about 
her. 

Were it needful to argue this point, we might put it 
on the most absolute grounds. All things are Christ's ; 
all dominions, dignities, potences ; it is especially meet 
that we say, to-day, all institutions. It is the grossest 
wrong practically to hold otherwise. It is loss, too, and 
nowhere more palpably than in the educational sphere. 
It is no cant saying to affirm, and that in a more than 
merely spiritual sense, that in Christ "are hid all the 
treasures of wisdom and knowledge.'' At His throne 
the lines of all science terminate ; above all, the science 
that has man for its subject. Of all history, for example, 
I'ightly read, how is He the burden and the glory ! 
Otherwise taken, it is a more than Cretan labyrinth. 
The Christian spirit, besides, raising the soul to the 
loftiest planes of thought, giving it the highest commu- 
nions, bringing before it the grandest objects, and 
securing to all its machinerj^ the most harmonious 
action, is eminently conducive to intellectual achieve- 
ment. We have already said something like this as 
touching moral culture ; but that, be it ever remem- 
bered, takes its proper form and direction only as it is 
vitally linked with Christianity. What God has joined 
together let not man put asunder. Let the studies 
which we call moral, have all a Christian baptism ; and, 
with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal 
points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still in- 
vestigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intel- 



33 



lectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects iu which 
our great New England metaphysician delighted to pi'c- 
sent it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of 
nnaloo:v, brido-e, to the formiiio: mind, the chasm between 
natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evi- 
dences be fullv unfolded. We can hardly dispense with 
them in an age. when, by means of Westminster Re- 
views, and other subtle organs of infidelity, the old mode 
of assault being abandoned, a sapping and mining pro- 
cess is continually going forward. Let Ethical Science, 
— embracing in its v>'ide sweep, the Economy of Private 
Life, the Philosophy of Government, and Law^ which 
" hath its seat in the bosom of God,'' — be all bathed in 
the light of Calvary. That light is its life. '"Let us 
Avith caution indulge the supposition," said the Father 
of our country, " that morality can be maintained with- 
out religion.'' Let the Bible be included among our 
text-books as the sun is included in the solar system ; 
and let all the rest revolve in planetary subjection about 
it. Let it be studied, not in a professional, much less in 
a partisan w^ay ; but with the conviction that it is indis- 
pensable to the broadest culture ; that without theology 
we have but a straitened anthropology ; that we see 
not nature aright, but as we look up through it to Na- 
ture's God. Be ours, in its largest signiticance, the 
sentiment so devoutly uttered b}- the old Hebrew bard : 
"In Thy light shall we see light." And let the disci- 
pline of College, so intimately connected with its pros- 
perity, be fashioned on the model of the Gospel. Let 



34 



it copy, in its way and measure, the wondrous har- 
monies of the redemptive scheme, in which " mercy and 
truth are met together, righteousness and peace have 
kissed each other." So shall it bless our halls with 
some faint reflection of the Divine fatherhood, and give 
to our society some happy resemblance to a Christian 
family. 

Such, in the ideal, is the College — the American Col- 
lege ; such in its position and power, such in its com- 
pleteness, its conservative, progressive, and Christian 
character. How far the ancient institution, at whose 
bidding we have assembled to-day, has realized this 
portraiture, it would not, perhaps, become me to say. 
I would not dishonor the silver locks of my Alma Mater 
by aught of boastfulness. Yet none will question, that 
in all the long track of her history — antedating the 
Republic, stretching now over almost a century — ^she 
has, at least, aimed at the wisest and best things. 
She has attempted, and she will still attempt, a scholarly 
balance and thoroughness of training. A precious link 
as she is between the present and the past, she would 
bring forth out of her treasury things new and old. Nor 
can she be' ever untrue to her pious origin. Never can 
she forget the tears of Christian love and zeal with 
Avhich her early pathway was bedewed ; the "i^ox da- 
mantis in deserto will ever linger on her ears. On a 
facade of the magnificent galleries at Yersailles I read, 
years ago, ''A toutes les gloirea de la France P To my 
mind's eye, these halls bear a nobler inscription : Christo 



35 



et ecde-sicB. And I do but utter the one sentiraeut of 
the guardians and teachers, the friends and patrons, of 
this institution, when I say, better that "both the cor- 
morant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels 
of it' their voice shall sing in the windows, desolation 
shall be in the thresholds," than that a godless philos- 
ophy shall supplant here the Divine Word, or our com- 
mon Christianity cease to be reverenced and vindicated. 
At the call of these honored Trustees, I assume to- 
day new and weighty responsibilities. It is neither 
affectation nor egotism to sa3\ that I approach them 
with the deepest solicitude. As I think of the excel- 
lent men who have preceded me ; of those especially 
to whom I sustained the relation of a loving and grate- 
ful pupil — one of whom has passed, in all ripeness of 
wisdom and virtue, to his reward, and the other, after 
a long term of able and faithful service, is permitted to 
honor this occasion with his presence ; 1 cannot but fear 
that I shall follow, noti passihu-s cequis. Yet with what- 
ever self-distrust, thoughts of hope and of courage clus- 
ter about me, and as good angels beckon me onward. 
The radiant memory of the past cheers me. I think of 
the jewels which, wuth liberal hand, old Dartmouth has 
scattered not over the land alone, but over the broad 
earth. Some of her brightest names, dear alike to 
science and to Christianity, have been inscribed imper- 
ishably on barbaric isles of the sea, and on regions 
darkened by the shadow of the mosque and the pagoda. 
While the genial voices of her living sons float about 



36 

me ; sounding out from the bar, the bench, the pulpit, 
and the walks of medical science ; from the chair of in- 
struction, the laboratory of art, and the lone study of 
the man of letters ; from the legislative hall and the 
cabinet ; and even from the haunts of industry, of trade 
and of finance : inspiriting voices of the dead steal upon 
my ear. The day and the place waken many an echo, 
of that unique utterance — worthily commended, at last, 
to socceeding times by a son of Dartmouth — the delight 
and the pride of the metropolitan bar, fascinating alike 
to the o-rave Senate and the rustic throng, but now 
hushed forever in Mount Auburn. The sleeper at 
Marsh tield stands again before the Supreme Tribunal of 
the land, pleading with filial devotion the cause of the 
College ; and, the matchless web of argument all woven, 
his whole soul wells up, — while his massive frame 
trembles with emotion, and hard legal faces are wet 
with tears, — in the simple, but tender utterance : " aS"?'/', 
tke7'e are those who love itP^ Yea, many a noble spirit, 
lost to earth, seems to gather fondly about us, breathing^ 
anew a benison on this familiar home of science. 

How often — we cannot but remember to-day — has 
death found in the corps of instruction here, his ''shin- 
ing mark!" My thoughts revert tenderly to my own 
beloved Professors. There was the laniented Chamber- 
lain ; in whom we knew^ not which most to admire, his 
rare command of the ancient classics, or his eloquent 
master}^ of his native tongue. There was the pure and, 
single-hearted Adams ; the riglit lines of whose geomet- 



37 



rical deinoiistraliuus were so a[)lly en^bleiiialic ol" liis 
^vliole life-course. There was the affable and iiideCatig- 
al)le Hale, since the honored Head of one of oni- 
sister Colleg-es. There was the urbane and accomplished 
Haddock ; whose very countenance, in its fine esthetic 
contour, did but image forth to us the still finer combi- 
nation of inward graces. There w^as the genial and 
earnest Shurtleff ; wlio charmed us not more by his 
acuteness, perspicacity, and playful wit, than by his fer- 
vent and outspoken devotion to our moral and s})iritual 
welfare. I think of fellow-students, too. Teachers here 
for a timCj who have ceased from their labors. There 
was Peabodt ; of such exquisite finish as a scholar, of 
such wdnniug and yet commanding mien. There was 
Chase, the profound mathematician : the light of whose 
genius, as it gleams through one of our text-books, yet 
lingers in our halls. There v^'as YorxG, calm, judi- 
cious, kindly : so lucid and thorough in all his instruc- 
tion. There was Loxg : so keen in analysis, of such 
clear insight ; so gentle, so guileless, so unassuming ; 
'• in wit a man, simplicity a child."' Nor can I forbear 
to add my ovv'u classmate, Worcester, wdiose active, 
penetrating, forceful intellect revealed itself as unmis- 
takably in his pupilage, as in the Tutor's chair or the 
sacred desk. Alas, that within these recent weeks, 
another dart has been sped by the "insatiate archer!"' 
It casts, indeed, a shadow upon the scenes of the day. 
that the ])laces which have been made glad by the ])i*e- 
sencc of the gentle, retined, scholarlv, true-hearted 



38 

Putnam, shall know him uo more ! But the will of God 
be done. He hath smitten, and He will heal us. He 
can replace, as He has done, the stars which fade from 
our lirmameut ; which do themselves decline only as 

" Sinks the day star in the ocean bed." 

We liave keenly felt, and we may have still to feel^ — 
though we humbly trust, not long — the touch of war ; 
that war which treason most atrocious has waged 
against both the life of our nation, and those great prin- 
ciples of freedom which are the hope of the world ; 
that war which makes vacant places in the Colleges, as 
well as in the dwellings of the land. Yet we yield from 
both our sons to the contest, in the glad assurance of a 
glorious issue. In meekness and lowliness of mind, but 
with no despondenc}^ would I receive, to-day, the keys 
of office. I shall lean confidingly both on the wise and 
faithful guardians of the Institution, and on the large 
and able Faculty, with which I deem it an honor to 
be associated. Amid these touching services, as we 
solemnly pledge ourselves to each other, we will all 
take heart for our work. Trusting devoutlj- in that 
Providence which has been so gracious in days gone ''v 
by, we will tend together this ancient light of learning, 
not doubting that it will shine on, more and more 
brightly, till its radiance shall be blent with the noon- 
tide of a world-wide Christian civilization. 



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